How park rich is your city?

Earlier this month, Park(ing) Day brought attention to the need for green space in the city with its pop-up mini parks. Those temporary parking spots-turned-parks are now gone, but if those mini paradises made you wonder exactly how park-rich or park-poor your city really is, a new report called City Park Facts 2010 lets you find out at a glance. (via Switchboard)

Put together by The Trust for Public Land, City Park Facts 2010 provides a wealth of data on urban green spaces. Wondering which large city offers the most park space as a percentage of the city area? That would be New York, where 19.5 percent of the land belongs to parks. On the other hand, because the Big Apple is so population-dense, the city only devotes 4.5 acres per 1000 residents. When it comes to how much parkland each city resident gets, Oakland gets top marks for high population cities, devoting 12.9 green acres per 1000 residents.

Los Angeles, the metropolis closest to where I live, could be doing a lot better. The City of Angels devotes 7.9 percent of its city area to park space — far lower than the 10.2 percent average for high-density cities — and 6.2 acres of parkland per 1000 residents — again, lower than the 6.9 percent average for high-density cities. Comparatively, our southern neighbor Long Beach is more park rich, devoting 10.1 percent of its city area to park space and 7.1 acres per 1000 residents.

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